Existentialism, a Very Short Introduction, by Thomas R. Flynn

I only want to say that the clearest exposition of such philosophical concepts comes from the books and YouTube interviews by the Labour politician (U.K.) Bryan Magee. He interviewed Iris Murdoch – the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch who wrote much about Existentialism. It is of course a philosophy which has a strong connection with literature of various sorts. Thanks for your short introduction to V.S.Is!!

Oh dear, it looks as if I’ve been bandying around the term ‘existentialist’ without really knowing what it means…

In the Preface to my latest adventure with the Very Short Introductions series, Thomas R. Flynn tells me that most people associate existentialism with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and the Left-Bank Parisian cafés where they hung out. And the problem with that is that existentialism tends to get ‘packaged’ as a cultural phenomenon of a certain historical period which tends to get linked to the problems of that era and not really relevant to our own. Flynn is on a mission to correct that because he says that existentialism is a way of doing philosophy that is still current.

So his first chapter, ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’ is about demolishing the idea of philosophy as a doctrine or system of thought. Philosophy, he says…